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Utilizing social BPM to organize collaboration chaos

Malcolm Ross, Senior Vice President, Product Strategy, Appian
July 31, 2013

Certain business processes can be complex and chaotic when approached without extensive preparation before hand. Many companies can encounter these types of problems when exploring new trends and technologies. Communications, cloud computing, enterprise social networks and mobility can all present unique issues that have to be overcome and eliminated so as to not occur at a later date. For many firms, this becomes an essential matter for business success.

Collaboration solutions in particular can be challenging and overwhelming for companies that aren't prepared for the changes coming. By investing in unified communications and collaboration tools, a firmis establishing its commitment to enhancing workflow and employee processes for teamwork, group projects and meetings. However, without the right support systems in place to optimize this approach, firms may encounter more roadblocks than expected. According to Christian Buckley, a contributor with CMSWire, businesses have to consider the connectivity, tracking and social aspects of communication and collaboration as well.

The key to implementing a strong social foundation for enterprise communications lies in optimizing business process management. With the right strategy in play, companies will be able to automate the essential, minor tasks while focusing on the mission-critical areas that will affect success and ROI the most. Optimally, a company will be able to integrate social BPM software seamlessly and start adopting aUC solution with ease afterward with very little adjustment time in between.

Social media is becoming a strong part of most people's lives, and as such provides a strong foundation to launch business improvements from a systemthat employees will be familiar with - making adjustment easier. A social platform will integrate BPM software with workflow and help simplify the transition to new processes while improving old ones. This will reduce the overall chaos that can occur when adopting new technologies or trends.

At the same time it is important for businesses to remember that chaos itself can be a strong motivator for improvement, and if well managed, provide significant benefits on its own. It can be beneficial to incorporate controlled chaos with BPM to optimize transitions to new modes of operations and show employees a new way of doing things faster. Controlled chaos can inspire innovation and new ideas in employees as well, and a firm may see some unexpected benefits as a result of worker's newfound ideas.

Malcolm Ross

Vice President of Product Marketing